1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multi-function telephone apparatus and control method therefor, and more particularly, to a multi-function telephone apparatus which is operated as a terminal of a personal computer or a host system and to control method of the telephone apparatus.
2. Prior Art
The conventional multi-function telephone apparatuses have functions such as not-at-home response, auto-dial, redial, or transfer to other telephone. For these functions an MPU is employed as a controller and IC memories and microcassettes are employed for voice recording or dial recording. Further, an LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) which can display characters of several lines is attached for dial display and the like.
Recently, as home-banking and home-trading have been tried and popularized, banking transactions such as balance inquiry, remittance and transfer or stock exchange have been able to be operated by communication lines. Adjusting to this trend, some of the multi-function telephones having personal computer functions to a certain degree have been provided.
Further considering a centralized information processing system, a host computer (hereinafter referred to as "host") has been provided as a center of the system accommodating multiple terminals thereunder, which are connected to the system by the communication lines.
As a typical example of such a system, a labor management system currently adapted by many corporations will now be considered. This system is generally comprising identification cards (hereinafter referred to as "ID card") possessed by each employee, dedicated reader-writer terminals for cards accommodating an internal clock therein (hereinafter referred to as "reader-writer") and a host, which processes input information from the reader-writers. An ID card is usually a plastic card on which a magnetic stripe is attached on the backside. A photo of an employee is attached and his/her name and section are embossed on the surface of the ID.
Accordingly, the reader-writer reads information from an ID card, and inputs the time indicated by the internal clock. This time is transmitted to the host as the time that an employee arrived or gets off from the work with other managerial information recorded on the magnetic stripe. The host loads an employee's labor management program stored in an external storage device into a main storage device and waits a data reception from the reader-writer. When, the information from the reader-writer is received, the host accesses the labor management data on each employee stored in a master file and reads the data on a particular employee, and then records the time that the employee checked in/out.
In large corporations, since a host system, which processes various types of managerial information in addition to the employee's labor management, is employed for a total unitary control, a cluster machine can be provided as a dedicated system for the employees' labor management. This cluster machine can receive the labor management data on each employee and process the data.
Since a hierarchy of the host and the cluster machine described above depends on a size of a corporation or complexity of a management system, it is needless to say that a host machine and a cluster machine can be structurally combined.
In the labor management system according to the above-described structure, in the case where a plurality of offices are physically separated from each other, a plurality of reader-writer terminals are set based on the number of employees in each office. Then, the data communication between the reader-writer terminals and the host are performed through communication lines such as private lines, leased lines, or public lines. That is, whenever an input/output operation is occurred at the reader-writer terminal, data is transmitted to the cluster or the host through the communication line.
However, according to the above described art, in the case where an incoming call arrives during the time that some application program (hereinafter referred to as "application") employed for some function of the multi-function telephone apparatus was being executing, or in the case where an outgoing call was needed, the execution of the application must be interrupted. At this time, considering data integrity, the application could not be forcefully terminated and an operation following a certain procedure has been required to terminate the application.
Accordingly, to terminate or to restart the application is a troublesome operation, and it takes rather a long time to process. There is the drawback that an incoming call cannot be responded immediately. Furthermore, there is another problem arisen such that operation keys for a telephone apparatus cannot be available for an outgoing call when the application is being executed, since the operation keys are also used for application keys. That is, the operation keys are totally occupied by the application.
Now, considering the characteristics of a labor management system as a typical centralized information processing system, it can be said that input/output operations in the reader-writer terminals will be concentrated in periods immediately before the time for employees to work and after the time to get off from the work. More particularly, suppose that a typical employee's working-hour is from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Then, the reader-writer terminals which read ID cards become extremely busy for some minutes before 9 a.m. and after 5 p.m.
Due to the above described reason, line load and busy rate become extremely high in the periods above mentioned daily. Therefore, it is necessary to increase the number of lines and reader-writers or to prepare high quality lines capable of responding to high speed transmission in order the system to cope with such a heavy load in the busy periods. On the other hand, it is necessary for a host side to be provided with a machine capable of high throughput so that the host can process numerous input data in short time.
However, there is a problem in the above described counterplan. Since each reader-writer device is expensive, a whole system becomes costly.
Further, abrupt increase in communication line load causes delay in reading ID cards. Therefore, even if an employee arrived in time, there may be a case that the recorded time is later than the actual time that the employee checked in. This may happen because the system recognizes that the host has read the ID card after the actual time that the employee checked in. This has been a main problem complained by employees. To solve this problem, increasing the number of reader-writers or communication lines or throughput of the host becomes again on the issue. However, as described above, it cannot be easily achieved because of the cost.
The employees' labor management system has been discussed so far as an example of a centralized information processing system. However, from a point of view in the operation of the centralized information processing system, not all operations are dealing with execution of data transfer or data processing in the host at the real time. Furthermore, even from a point of view in throughput of the host or communication line load, reconsideration on data transfer is desired.